NEW YORK — Bernadette Peters stopped by a desolate corner of Brooklyn the other day to hang out with a special group of fans. They were literally barking.

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By
MARK KENNEDY
Posted Jul. 14, 2013 @ 12:01 am

NEW YORK — Bernadette Peters stopped by a desolate corner of Brooklyn the other day to hang out with a special group of fans. They were literally barking.

A deafening chorus of woofs greeted the two-time Tony Award winner as she toured the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition and checked in with shelter dogs Louise, Melissa, Sparrow, Joseph, Bobby, Greg and Diamond.

“This is my passion,” she says after stroking tails and caressing ears. “I realized what a womanizer is because I’m a dog-inizer. I want every dog, like the man who wants every woman.”

Many animals in this no-kill, privately run animal shelter owe their lives to Peters, who is known to scan the lists of dogs scheduled to be euthanized and rush over to save them from death.

“It isn’t hard to find people who care about animals, but when you have the passion that Bernadette has and the drive and the consistent effort to save all these critters, that’s special,” says fellow actor David Hyde Pierce.

Peters visited the shelter on this day hoping it would be the last time she would see many of “her dogs” there; several will be starring in Saturday’s adopt-a-thon she cofounded 15 years ago called Broadway Barks.

She and fellow actress and animal advocate Mary Tyler Moore started the annual star-studded event in 1999 in Shubert Alley — a pedestrian alley at the heart of the Broadway theater district — to help promote animal adoption and raise awareness of the plight of homeless animals.

The event has grown from a folding-table affair with a few animals to a mammoth one with celebrities, musical acts and animals from 27 shelters across the city.

It helps find homes for about 200 animals each year, part of the reason the numbers of animals killed in the city has been falling. An estimated 31,000 animals were euthanized in 2003 and only 8,000 last year.